LinkPatrol

What do I usually want to see in a good tool? Contrary to what you might think, I never expect a tool to do part of my job or give me some information I would be unable to find without it. The most important thing I usually look for is a convenient way to represent the data.

There are plenty of backlink checkers online that do nothing more than export the data from Yahoo SiteExplorer or Google. There are still a few ones that offer information in a way that helps you categorize and organize it more effectively.

1. LinkHounds Yahoo Backlink Information sorts results based on the IP address, thus showing only unique IP/domain backlinks. The tool allows to exclude any domain from the results and set the query depth. For each individual result you will also see useful quick links to:

whois data;

site web archive;

Google cache;

exact pages where the backlink was found as indexed by Yahoo.

2. Domain Backlinks Checker sorts the results based on the first- and second-level domains. The tool offers the information in a very convenient way linking to each page from the certain domain where the backlink was found.

3. Link Diagnosis tool is the best at representing information offering the wide variety of sorting options based on:

link type (nofollow, missing, good);

link anchor text;

PageRank;

page internal+external links.

It also offers a helpful export option and calculates link power for every internal page of the site.

Ann Smarty is the blogger and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. Ann's expertise in blogging and tools serve as a base for her writing, tutorials and her guest blogging project, MyBlogGuest.com.

Can you give me an example? Link Diagnosis reports all the links that Yahoo does but strips out site-wide links so you won’t see thousands of links there like on yahoo, which I think its useful feature and makes analysis quicker. There is no filter that it would remove old valuable links.

Based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer data and several other tools and API’s for domain data enrichment, a new SEO tool is being developed as we speak and will be released shortly (somewhere in December’08, January’09). It basically combines most of the intel generated by the SEO tools you list here. This SEO tool is called: RankInspector (www.rankinspector.com). I’ld be happy to share a beta test account with you for review if you’re interested.

What a great post. Tried them all. It looks like they all do a good job. But, it would be great if I knew what I was looking at (the results). Some numbers look good, some bad. Exploring my neverending learning curve. Thanks for your great informative post (at that group of links too)